Hi All,


I want to load into the variable very long string (more than 80 characters) . For example:

#!/bin/tcsh
set VAR = "abcdefg qwertyuiop hjklgfdsaqwerttt etc etc etc etc ...."
echo $VAR

In order to make the script easier to read, I wold like to split the string into two lines. For example:

#!/bin/tcsh
set VAR = "abcdefg qwertyuiop \
hjklgfdsaqwerttt etc etc etc etc ...."
echo $VAR

It does not work.

Is there a way to accomplish this ?

Igor

P.S (Nov 5th 2006)

I've made a typo in the code snippets from above. Both $VAR should be quoted. In all my attempts on terminal, I've used "$VAR"... but when I've posted the question on LQ, I made a mistake. Sorry for the confusion

Summary:
echo "$VAR" does not work in second case
echo $VAR works in both cases

I've figured it out after reading case (4) on this link http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/, posted by soggycornflake as post #5 bellow.

Must be a shell thing. Both of your examples work for me perfectly under bash (but I left off the "set" - not needed under bash for your example). With or without the trailing backslashes.

I don't know about tcsh. I've never used that shell.

perhaps you need to keep $VAR inside double quotes:

Personally I prefer the borne-like shells for scripting (bash & ksh being the ones I use the most). cshell and friends don't agree with me. You'll might get more mileage out of forums like this with borne-like shells since they are the default on many Linux distros. Having said that, choice is good.

csh is fine for interactive use but it's a bad idea to script with it. Read this.

I don't think you can do what you want with csh (see section 4 of that link).